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Dear University of California: You’ve taken enough from your students (and their parents) over the years. It’s time to give something back. It’s time to admit your new logo is loco, and lose it.

“It’s time?” some of you are saying. “I’ve never even seen the new logo! I’ve never even heard of it!”

A) You’re lucky. You can’t unsee it.

B) The logo’s lack of effectiveness is exactly the point.

Although the logo has been in use for months, the Oakland Tribune started a backlash on Friday by “breaking” the news of UC’s rebranding. One student at UC Davis tweeted UC President Mark Yudof that the logo is “so horrible it makes me want to cry.”

By Monday, less than 72 hours later, a change.org petition to “stop the new UC logo” had more than 40,000 signatures. You don’t need a UC education to know that that’s a rate of about 10 signatures per minute.

But nothing shows the rebranding’s lack of impact more than something a spokeswoman told me. A marketing team has been using it for months to create a systemwide brand instead of letting individual labs, hospitals and 10 campuses sell themselves.

UC logo change

“The question is, ‘Is it doing what we want it to do?’” UC President’s Office spokeswoman Dianne Klein said. “And right now the answer is yes, in that we’ve had over a year of experience and people who are coming up on this via some Facebook post really don’t understand the context and where it’s being used.”

Reactions on said Facebook page, called “Stop the UC Logo Change,” run a small gamut, from “This looks like a final project assignment for a middle-school introduction to design class,” to “Hold up. What if the designer went to UC? Oh God.”

And the new slogan? Don’t even get me started.

Let’s pause here to describe the logo for those who haven’t seen it on ucop.edu or elsewhere under headlines such as “The New University of California Logo Still Exists, Which Means It Must Be Destroyed.”

Imagine a U capped on top with the shape of an opened textbook. Now imagine a C within the U that looks like one of those circular “loading” icons you see all too often on your laptop.

Yes, I consciously chose images that UC’s 222,000 students could appreciate. No, I didn’t see that the logo looks like a flushing toilet until a colleague — a USC grad, I might add — showed me one of many blog posts that had made the connection.

With criticism mounting, Jason Simon, UC’s director of marketing and communications, noted that the new logo will not entirely replace the old one — a circular seal from 1868 with a star beaming down upon an open book that is wrapped in a ribbon reading, “Let there be light.”

The new logo is for digital marketing but not diplomas, though Simon stressed it’s not an either-or situation. The logo is meant to show there is nothing static about an excellent education, though I’ll stress that UC is not a start-up company, a point Simon made himself.